Rawr: Evolve And Killing Floor 2 Holding Trial Weekends

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Whether you want to be a monster or murder them this weekend, video games have you covered. Evolve [official site] and Killing Floor 2 [official site] are both holding free trial weekends on Steam right now, giving you until 9pm UK time on Sunday to play the full versions of the first-person shooters. As is customary, both of the games are on sale too, if you turn out to want them for ever and ever and ever until entropy tears Steam apart particle by particle and we all become nothing.

If you’ve been under a rock: Killing Floor 2 is a co-op wave survival FPS set around post-monster apocalypse Europe, though it’s still in Early Access. Evolve, on the other hand, is a 4v1 FPS where four folks play monster hunters and the other controls a honking great monster out to devour wildlife and players alike to grow even bigger and nastier – a bit like a game focused around Left 4 Dead’s tank, which is no surprise considering Evolve makers Turtle Rock created L4D. Here’s what we made of Evolve.

You should have ’em in your Steam library waiting to be installed, or you can hit their Steampages.

That’s also where you’ll find them on sale. Evolve is half-price, down to £12.49, while Killing Floor 2 knocks a third off to be £13.32.

This, oh dear god yes this. KF2 is wonderful, and if youre a fan of metal it’s got a great soundtrack (though I recommend disabling the vocals unless youre a fan of Slipknot growls and metalcore singing about souls being on fire…)

Yes it’s in early access, but listen to the funny british voices! And if you own Chivalry you can play as an Agatha knight and wear a riot cop helmet and buy a zweihander and have a gay old time cutting up zeds.

This. Get KF2, or at least play it. It looks pretty much great. It plays very well, much better than Evolve for me. Granted, I haven’t tried Evolved outside beta but the numbers speak for themselves 17k players KF2, 5k players Evolve.

Wow, $3. That’s a steal for Abyss Odyssey. Roguelike Smash Bros-em-up with a great art style and unique mechanics. Played through it local coop with a friend and sometimes my girlfriend. Highly recommended.

Evolve is definitely worth a shot, although it’s admittedly not going to be everyone’s cup of tea. For my money it’s some of the most fun gameplay in recent memory, occasionally (often) hampered by a lot of externalities such as matchmaking and balance issues. It’s been consistently (albeit slowly) getting better since release though and game-breaking issues are few and far between.

I broke my “no early access” rule (more of a guideline, really) for KF2 after a lot of positive feedback and personally I still regret it. I was really underwhelmed by KF2’s new classes and aside from the fantastic soundtrack and the pretty gore I find the game to be seriously lacking in fun.
It’s probably still worth trying for free though – the people I play it with tend to regularly describe rounds as “crazy” or “intense” and thoroughly enjoy themselves, so it’s obviously got some appeal to some people!

I agree regarding Evolve. I have been playing it since release and have been enjoying myself a lot. Its definitely not a game for everyone since the game has a pretty steep learning curve. It might look simple at first glance but the game is quite complex actually.

Actually the problem is that it is quite simple when you get to play as the monster. Playing as one of the hunters is far more complex and takes a lot more teamwork, teamwork that randoms almost never provide. So from my perspective, one of the five players in any given game is having fun, while the other four are slogging through a tedious chore.

It’s a big step backward from Left4Dead 2, and Killing Floor 2 fills that niche for this generation of games better than Evolve does.

As primarly a Monster-player I have to disagree with you. When you as Monster play against new people or people whom arent that coordinated and doesnt know what strenghts/weaknesses each hunter has not to say the monster then yes, its quite easy to win as monster. But if you encounter a moderately good team that knows what they are doing then it gets much much harder as monster and you really have to play smart and be strategic. Same goes for hunters of course.

In my opinion there is a lot of depth at both sides in Evolve and you have to know your character and know how to play your class/character/monster or you are going to fail.

Got to disagree. The problem with Evolve is that it’s far too simple. Mechanics and gameplay have no depth. Both betas showed me everything I was going to see. Trying again this trial weekend and my opinion hasn’t been changed.

Evolve is still downloading for me, but I tried KF2. Good graphics and solid shooting gameplay, but it is really repetitive and is already getting old after a few hours of play. Just fighting waves of the same monsters over and over again. The bosses are fun though. I’ll probably play it for another 5 hours or so and then uninstall it.

Once you get into it a bit more, you discover quite a lot of complexity, which made people sticking with it for hundreds and thousands of hours. It is difficult, it requires teamwork and you can experiment with loadouts, strategies etc.

I am talking about first game, as I have only played the second for few hours and it’s still early access, but it already shows a promise.

It has pretty standard M+KB controls. I didn’t notice anything frustrating about it. (Well, hosting your own server requires some weird steps, but that’s not a console problem. Unless you want to pun on it needing you to open a terminal and in-game console)

Definitely disagree. Plays better on KB/M, graphics options are a-plenty (there’s no way the PS4 is running this on any higher than medium settings), easy rebinding of all keys, etc. Killing Floor was PC exclusive and Tripwire stuck to their PC roots with KF2. I’m not going to say you’re flat-out lying, maybe just misinformed.